High resolution polymer/air double-cavity Fabry–Perot fiber temperature sensor based on exposed core microstructured fiber

Abstract This study proposes a high-resolution optical fiber Fabry–Perot (FP) temperature sensor and it is based on an exposed-core microstructured optical fiber (ECF) coated by a ultraviolet curing polymer adhesive. Then, a small piece of multimode fiber (MMF) with large core diameter is spliced in front of ECF to expand the input light beam, and the parallel polymer/air double-cavity FP in such single-mode fiber (SMF)-MMF-ECF-SMF structure is constructed. Additionally, by employing a mobilized demodulation module, the interference signal is analyzed by phase demodulation method. The experimental results show that the temperature sensitivity of the sensor is 30.8 ℃ −1 and the resolution is up to 1.6 × 10 −4 ℃ in a range of 20 ℃–50 ℃, which can achieve high resolution temperature measurement. Furthermore, to alleviate the wavelength uncertainty of the demodulation device, a double-cavity self-reference differential phase modulation method is explored in the proposed parallel double-cavity FP. It shows that the stability could be improved to five times when system temperature is unstable, which offers an alternative method to further improve the temperature sensing resolution.